Current status

Detailed Description

That feature aims at synchronising the top of the Fedora tree with the current Boost upstream release. The current Fedora release is boost-1.41.0, folded into devel 2009-11-17.

As of Fedora 13, the canonical sources used for the package switched from the official Boost release (with BJam build) to an alternate repository (with CMake build, for boost-1.41.0). That alternate repository seems to be no longer actively maintained.

The challenge is therefore to go on packaging with CMake. If that fails, Fedora packaging will have to switch back to BJam build. In case it is successful, however, Fedora 14 should ship with Boost 1.44.

Boost ships with an ad-hoc build system named BJam. The Boost development community is exploring alternate build and source code control approaches, including the use of more standard build and release management tools like git and CMake. Which, frankly, the Fedora boost maintainers wish to support. Fortunately for us, a team of developers had worked for over a year on a more standard way to build Boost, thanks to the CMake tool, namely Boost-CMake. However, the activity of that group has stalled since December 2009. Some members of the group would help any initiative, but nobody has taken the lead yet.

Benefit to Fedora

Syncing with upstream keeps Fedora current. This is part of regular package maintenance.

Scope

Upstream sources for Boost releases are evaluated, along with alternate repositories. One is selected, packaged according to Fedora package conventions and cognizant of existing package practices, tested, evaluated, and then built in Koji. This is then pushed to fedora devel. Dependencies are rebuilt. The unicorns are once again happy, and can go back to drinking champagne and complaining about slow build times.

How To Test

No special hardware is needed.

Testing of the Boost packages themselves requires the host system to have the boost-test package installed. Testing can then be enabled at package build time by passing --with tests. Note that that testing phase should be done only once per type of architecture and distribution version.

Once the Boost packages have been built and checked according to the previous step, testing simply consists in installing them on Fedora 14 and checking that it does not break any other package dependency.

Expected results: all the packages depending on Boost (for instance, gnash, pingus, kdeedu or k3d) should work properly on Fedora 14.

User Experience

Expected to remain largely the same.

Dependencies

There are a large number of dependencies for the boost package in fedora. Here is a non-exhaustive list.